Long story short, I am a member of a photography club which runs a series of 6 competitions through each year. The competitions are for three images per person, each marked out of 20, with the winner being the person with the highest score out of a possible 60 points. At the end of the year, the much coveted Photographer of the Year (POTY) trophy goes to the person with the best score out of a possible 360.
A chance conversation with a lady I had never previously met, has revealed that one of our members (let's call him Bill) regularly cheats in competitions to get better scores. The rules state that all images must be the work of the member entering the competition. It transpires that Bill has a good friend - Ben - who is also a highly accomplished photographer, but not a club member, and regularly "borrows" images from Ben to enter in the events, if he feels he doesn't have any of his own work of a sufficiently high standard. On some occasions, all three of Bill's entries were in fact Ben's work. This has been going on for years apparently, and Bill has won the POTY trophy several times over the years - fraudulently, it seems.
The lady who told me this (in all innocence) was Ben's wife, who I met at a social event with mutual friends over Christmas.
I'm sure that, by now, Mrs Ben will have told her husband about our conversation (and the fact that I mentioned that such a practice was strictly against the club rules), and i'm equally sure that Ben will have told Bill. I'm further upset because Bill is on the club committee and, it seems, other members of the committee know about this but have turned a blind eye, which - to me - tars them all with the same "dishonest" brush.
It's the first meeting of the year on Wednesday, and the first competition the following week. Bill will be at both events.
I know this is a small issue on the scale of things, but there's a bigger principle here. This is a club of generally lovely people that I have enjoyed being a member of for several years and now feel that whole thing is a tainted by this deception. WWYD?